I’m trying to build a very simple location-based app and I have all of these services at my disposal (Foursquare API, SimpleGeo, Google Places, etc). All seem to provide me a list of venues (bars, coffee shops, stores, etc) near a given longitude latitude. This is great but once the users see the venues, they will be able to write reviews about each venue (for example). Now, what do I do with this data?
- User ID (users for my app)
- Venue Name (retrieved from Foursquare API)
- Longitude, Latitude
- Foursquare Venue ID
- Review
Do I store this in my database? What happens if the venue name changes on the Foursquare servers? If I don’t store this in my database, I’d have to do a lookup to retrieve the venue name and details every single time I want to return a list of reviews in the area. Can someone offer some advice on how to conceptually design a venue-based location app. Thanks.
Store the essential 3rd party info in your database but treat it as a cache. Have a background task that checks for updates every few minutes, days, or weeks depending on the likelyhood & severity of changes. In between updates the user may get stale data but hey, that’s life… at least they got it fast. In doing your updates, don’t update everything at once or you’ll run quickly into API throttling limits.